Windaroo State School

Location: Logan City, Queensland

Windaroo State School in the Mount Warren Park area of Logan City has an enrolment of around 930 students. A significant number of students are from low-income backgrounds. Approximately 50 students are Indigenous and 80 students are from non-English-speaking language backgrounds. A Special Education Program also operates in the school to support students with low incident support needs.

How Windaroo State School has used its Gonski funding

Windaroo received around $200,000 Gonski funding in 2014 and $300,000 in 2015.

Windaroo has invested in improving the literacy and numeracy achievement of its students, with an emphasis on building staff capacity through focussed coaching and professional development for teachers and support staff.

Specialist educators and highly qualified teacher aides have been engaged to support individual students and small groups with particular learning needs to improve in Reading and Writing, particularly in Prep to Grade 3.

Teaching staff have received additional professional development and coaching in explicit teaching practice in reading and writing by increasing the hours of the school’s literacy coach, and quality new resources have been purchased to support the school’s reading program.

How Gonski funding has made a difference for students

Student achievement has been steadily improving, which the principal Bobby Harding says could never have been done without the additional funding.

“As a school our NAPLAN results over the past three years havemoved from having nineteen various indicators below average to having only one in 2015. [This is] a great improvement indeed.”

What Windaroo could do with Gonski in the future

The full six years of Gonski funding, would enable Windaroo to build on these early successes by extending the supports currently available to students. Oral Language support, which has been proven to improve students’ future achievements in Reading, would be increased by purchasing additional Speech Pathology services. Guidance Officer hours would also be increased to support the social and emotional wellbeing of students.

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Colac Primary School, located in rural Victoria, has an enrolment of 236 students, most of whom are from low-income backgrounds. Indigenous students comprise 4% of the students, with another 4% comprising students from non-English-speaking backgrounds.

Mansfield SS has a stable enrolment pattern of over 900 students. 20 per cent of its students were born overseas in 44 different countries, many of them coming to Australia from India, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand and the Philippines.

Wadalba Community School, located on the NSW Central Coast, is a comprehensive P-12 school with an enrolment of 1,400 students. 75% of students are from low-income backgrounds, 8% of students are Indigenous, and 7% of students are from non-English-speaking backgrounds.